Photography in Theater 

Theater and photography were born because man needed to creatively exist through expression.

Photography is not just recording when in theater. It may be introduced as a mediator but what it really wants is to add one more outcome in the plot of the play. What it actually does is to flourish the fruit of the acting and directed play.

If we suppose that theater is a universe and hosts the hole spectrum that contains soul, body and mind, then the translation of the dynamic of such a photographic – theater  frame would be equal to the notion of infinity.

Photographs in theater breath out silence and some other times drama. They impact happiness or insanity, the movement of the temporal frame that borrows from the “figurative” real life.  The importance of a move from “theatrical expression” to an “image” is not has to do only with visual attribution (which is very important as well) but it is also approached with target to designate all kinds of movement into feeling, rhythm, message, concern, functioning humbling for the spectator.

Another landmark for both photography and the play itself is the lighting. We could argue it is a landmark  of creative importance.

The interpretation of a role almost couples with the appropriate lights and the photographer may rock their relationship. The script has a specific story and style. Lights are planned with with that as basis, they compose a harmonic relationship among words and their efficiency. 

So, lights are another important factor that is going to influence the shade of the play. Undeniable, the game with the light in the stage is introduced as a “challenge” for both photographer and actor. The stage is imposing by itself. The photographer is not excluded by its influence. It strengthens with his/her lence, it becomes a role, spectator, fragment of whole and the whole is part of the theatrical inconceivable.

While it listens, it focus on the interpretational abilities of the actors so that during the shot it boosts their liberation. This interaction will offer us an intense shot. 

In theater, everything has an existence and everything has an importance of its own. The outcome depends on the collectiveness and the collaboration of a creative team of people. The photographer gets into a pre existing togetherness and acts in order to complete. He/she understands the hospitality of the timespace of a theater rehearsal and acts in terms of photography.

Aristoteles argued that “time is the number of the movement according to before and after”. Somewhere there theater of “before” and after” penetrates. The shooting penetrates as a “now” in order to give power to it and place it in the eternity of human memory. In short, if the theater is motion, its  shoot will be “in motion”.

Readers Write : Ypatia Kornarou